How We Forgot Iraq

What to say about Iraq, ten years on? Ten years ago today was the night of “Shock and Awe.” I stood on a Baghdad hotel balcony with three other reporters and we watched, astonished; gasped for air in between blasts; and involuntarily screamed as over two thousand American warheads hit the city around us, wrecking the most iconic buildings in Saddam’s Republican palace complex. The next morning, Iraqis went to work as always, the commuters driving past the smoking palace ruins without looking, immutable. It was an old, self-protective habit Iraqis had learned during Saddam’s rule: you did not, on pain of possible death, show that you noticed anything that he or his family did, much less comment on it. And so, on the first day it became clear that Saddam’s rule was finally going to be pulverized, it seemed wisest to continue ignoring what lay before their eyes.

Over the next three weeks, as the bombing reached a crescendo, most ordinary Iraqis continued to quietly watch and wait. When they lost someone close to them, they wept in grief, but I heard no one curse the Americans—nor Saddam, for that matter. By the time the American troops appeared in the center of Baghdad, on April 9th, everyone I knew had lost a relative in one or another of the bombings or the lethal street crossfires of the previous twenty-fours hours. For all their “smartness,” enough bombs had gone awry or missed their targets to kill many hundreds of civilians. Still, among the Iraqis I knew, their mourning families attributed their losses to the fate of God while expressing their satisfaction that the Americans, after so long, had come to rescue them. They waited to be told what to do. No instructions ever came.

Instead, as the Americans allowed the city, including its armories, to be looted—in many cases by members of the ancien régime—while issuing fiats that disbanded the old army and banned the Baath Party, my Iraqi friends became first bewildered and then fearful. Within weeks, the “defeated” regime, with jihadist allies, had begun fighting back, of course, and the real Iraq war began. Almost every single Iraqi I knew then has had to flee the country and today lives in exile: in Sweden, in Cyprus, in the U.K., in the U.S., and many other countries.

We quietly withdrew from Iraq in 2011. Now, with waning interest in Afghanistan—that other U.S. war, now winding down; the one that, four years ago, President Barack Obama believed was still worth waging—Iraq has become the Great American Unmentionable, the fiasco that was.

Iraq has dropped from America’s national discourse like a hot stone since the last U.S. combat troops were extracted. Its disappearing act rivals that of the man who launched the war, George W. Bush. Almost no one has said a thing, apart from notes on the anniversary, since Obama’s chapter-closing speech, which dutifully highlighted America’s achievements there. In the most surreal part of it, sounding for all the world like the C.E.O. of DHL, Obama described as a laudable achievement how “thousands of tons of equipment have been packed up and shipped out.”

Notwithstanding the belated success of General Petraeus’s 2007 troop surge and the concurrent Sunni Awakening, which permitted us to carry out our troop withdrawal with a modicum of decency, the Iraq war represents a geostrategic catastrophe of colossal proportions for the U.S., not to mention a humanitarian catastrophe for Iraqis. It remains a severely damaged country. Iraq today is effectively a Finlandized state, under the influence of a vituperatively anti-Western Iran.

In keeping with national custom—remember Vietnam?—we calculate only the number of Americans who were killed in Iraq; their four thousand four hundred and eighty-six deaths have been carefully tabulated. As for the Iraqis, no one knows how many died. During the war itself, famously, the Pentagon declared that it didn’t keep casualty figures for Iraqis, and there it remains. There have been wildly fluctuating estimates, but it would seem likely that, at a minimum, some hundred and twenty-five thousand Iraqis died as a result of our invasion—and, it should be said, continue to do so today. But the only Hollywood movie that consecrates our Iraq experience, and that significant numbers of Americans went to see, “The Hurt Locker,” is a self-referential film about our pain, not theirs. There are, meanwhile, popular video games, like Call of Duty and Full Spectrum Warrior, in which millions of us constantly return to Iraq, virtually, and win battles we actually lost, or never really waged.

The new normal in Iraq is a country where oil is pumped and nightlife has returned to parts of Baghdad, but where suicide bombs also go off, here and there, every few days, with the regularity of tornados touching down in Oklahoma. As if to drive that point home, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia—the terrorist force that our ill-conceived invasion unleashed from Iraq’s chest of horrors—came out yesterday, on the anniversary of the initiation of hostilities, and set off bombs that killed at least fifty-seven people. As we celebrate—what, no longer being there?—let’s spare a moment for Iraq, and the Iraqis.

Photograph: Alex Majoli/Magnum.

Jon Lee Anderson, a staff writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998.